Francis Fukuyama ("The Great Disruption," May Atlantic) remarks that "in fact the great American postwar crime wave began in a period of full employment and general prosperity." Precisely. Prosperity results in modernization, and modernization has various consequences. One of those consequences was the rise of a new urban underclass.

Our urban underclass consists of displaced southern peasants and their descendants. In 1945 much of southern agriculture, notably cotton, was still dependent on hand labor, mediated by the sharecropper-tenancy system. In Alvin Toffler's terms, these workers were still in the first wave, rather than the second. Depression and war had forced southern agriculture to defer modernization for twenty years. In the postwar period southern landowners had the money for new equipment, especially combine cotton harvesters. Southern landlords evicted their tenants, destroyed the tenants' houses, and bought new combine harvesters.

The refugees of this displacement process arrived in northern cities only to find that northern industrialists had also been buying labor-saving machinery and that the existing industrial labor force had first claim on whatever jobs were available. Eventually some industrial jobs opened up, when the northern working class no longer wanted them (having sent their children to school to become policemen, teachers, and so forth), but that took time. In the meantime, many of the displaced peasants turned to crime and violence.

Many European countries (and Japan) have taken the stance that allowing people to evict peasants is simply not profitable from a societal point of view. Peasants can adapt to the city only if they are allowed to arrive at their own pace, with the option of returning to the farm if urban life does not agree with them. Even when European peasants did not own land, they were protected by appropriate legislation. Of course, often they did own land, because as early as the sixteenth century central governments began enforcing rent control, eventually expropriating the landlord in favor of the peasant.

Andrew D. Todd

In "The Great Disruption," Francis Fukuyama writes, "A dynamic, technologically innovative economy will by its very nature disrupt existing social relations." I find this statement difficult to reconcile with his claim that "social order, once disrupted, tends to get remade," and even more so with his optimistic assertion that such a process of social regeneration may have already begun.

The technological explosion to which Fukuyama attributes the rampant individualism at the heart of our social disorder is the product of neo-liberal democracy and market capitalism, both imbued by Fukuyama with an aura of Hegelian inevitability, and both totally committed to the excessive individualism he deplores. Clearly, it is not in theirnature to encourage the "trade-off between personal freedom and community" that he feels is so essential to rehumanizing society, so one is at a loss to identify the source of his optimism.

Fukuyama fails to consider that the collective psyche of the late twentieth century has been so deeply imprinted with the ideology of individualism that even those who are conscious of the need for trade-offs between personal freedom and community tend to back away when faced with the price to be paid for their professed ideals. This is the real victory of late capitalism over the hearts and minds of its adherents.

Until Fukuyama addresses this collective psychological fact, his belief that the Great Disruption may have run its course will remain little more than wishful thinking.

Howard Bluth

Sometimes one article is worth the year's subscription price. For me it is "The Great Disruption."

Richard E. Appel

Andrew Todd points to the migration of rural blacks to northern cities as the source of what I labeled the "Great Disruption" -- that is, the descent into social anarchy and family breakdown that emerged in many inner cities by the 1980s. But poor blacks were being drawn north, as Nicholas Lemann showed in his book The Promised Land, by plentiful low-skill jobs in the 1940s and 1950s; intense social pathology didn't emerge for another fifteen to twenty years. I believe that it is less the migration itself than the disappearance of these jobs in the 1970s that is at the root of the problem, exacerbated by a welfare system that rewarded single-parent families.

Howard Bluth seems to think that intensive individualism is the product of a certain type of late-twentieth-century "neo-liberal"capitalism. In fact it is deeply embedded in the whole Western Enlightenment, which has been ongoing for at least the past three centuries, and is part and parcel of the individual freedoms we all enjoy. As I explain at greater length in the book on which my Atlantic article was based, capitalism both destroys and creates social capital, and on balance is, as Adam Smith argued, a moralizing force in commercial societies. But the ultimate reason for my optimism is that we human beings by our very natures don't like individualism carried to extremes, and tend to moderate it by creating new social rules that bind us in communities. Whether I'm right this time around, only time will tell.

I am, of course, very grateful that Richard Appel feels he got his money's worth in subscribing to The Atlantic.

I was very disappointed in Francis Davis's "Napoleon in Rags" (May Atlantic). I am simply not interested in hearing why the music someone loves (often the music with which he or she came of age) is more profound or meaningful than someone else's music.

Davis's article presents opinions as facts and is both unattractive and misguided. An example: Davis says "As songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were surprisingly traditional; they brought a youthful cheekiness to pop, but in terms of lyrical sentiment and melodic structure their songs of the sixties merely updated Tin Pan Alley conventions." Very few composers or musicologists would agree with such an irresponsible and inaccurate statement, because, of all things, the Beatles were extremely original in their progressions.

Alexander Wood

Francis Davis refers in passing to "Positively 4th Street" as "a song from Highway 61 Revisited," the 1965 album often praised as Dylan's masterwork. It isn't.

Glenn Hughes

A couple of factual notes: The song "Positively 4th Street" is not on Highway 61 Revisited. Also, the quote from "Like a Rolling Stone" isn't quite correct -- it's "Napoleon in rags and the language that he used."

Stephen Wacker

Perhaps believing "Tin Pan Alley" to be a pejorative, Alexander Wood misunderstands what I said about the Beatles, whose music I preferred to Dylan's when I was a teenager and still do. Unlike Dylan's quasi-folk ballads and blues, Lennon and McCartney's early numbers were in the same 32-bar format as Jerome Kern's and Irving Berlin's, but with an updated beat. Their chord progressions were sometimes "original," if by this Wood means inventive, though not necessarily more inventive than Kern's or Berlin's.

Glenn Hughes and Stephen Wacker are right about "Positively 4th Street," which was recorded at one of the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited but did not appear on that LP. Dylan often changes the lyrics to his songs in performance; to my ears, it sounds like he sings "the language that he'd use"on both the 1965 hit of "Like a Rolling Stone" and the version from Manchester, England, on Live 1966.

"There was in fact a great deal at stake for Britain in the Great War," Benjamin Schwarz writes ("Was the Great War Necessary?," May Atlantic.) "Even assuming a benevolent German order on the Continent, the result of Germany's victory would have been that British independence as a great power would have been greatly diminished." But Britain ostensibly "won" the war, and its independence as a great power was greatly diminished in any case.

Britain's efforts from September of 1939 to 1942 to contend with the German and the Japanese armed forces are laughable -- whether we are talking about France or Singapore. Britain was saved from German conquest in the Second World War by the Americans and the Soviet Union. The fact of the matter is this: Britain in August of 1914 had already entered a steep descent toward being a second-rate power, whether economically or militarily. But the British government and the majority of Britain's ruling class could not face the reality of this decline, because then they would have had to reflect on the reasons for this descent: principally an unwillingness to absorb and utilize modern technology, an educational system backward at all levels, and the physical weakness and illiteracy of Britain's working class. War seemed a good alternative to facing these realities. Glory could cover up reason.

could have prevented Britain's decline in the twentieth century relative to Germany, the United States, and Russia. But the country's social and political leaders would not face this cruel fact, which indicated plainly that nothing was to be gained from war with Germany in 1914, and much was to be lost. Niall Ferguson is right.

Norman F. Cantor

In Benjamin Schwarz's review of Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War one looks in vain for a discussion of the major deficiency of the book. It treats the reasons the British had for entering the First World War as though these were the only important things to examine when one considers the casualties incurred, without ever considering the incompetence of Britain's generals and the political choices made in choosing those generals and keeping them in charge.

It is as though a seriously ill person were hurt in an auto accident while being driven to the hospital by a reckless driver. One cannot examine only whether one would have been better off staying at home; one should consider whether one could have chosen a better driver.

The reckless drivers for Britain in the First World War were its generals. Hundreds of thousands of men were senselessly slaughtered in obedience to a reckless macho doctrine called "élan vital." Few of the commanding generals acted on the self-evident fact that charging bravely back and forth across strategically worthless land will not win a war against shells, machine guns, and poison gas.

Stephen E. Adler

I agree with Norman Cantor's assertions about pre-war Britain's weaknesses. But his letter mixes apples and oranges. The historians who have most carefully diagnosed those weaknesses (Correlli Barnett, whom I discuss in my article, and Paul Kennedy) disagree with him and agree with me about what was at stake for Britain in the Great War. Certainly Britain's relative decline was inevitable; that does not mean that it would have been wise of British statesmen to stand aside and accept the dominance of Europe by a single power. Statesmanship, after all, is about managing"inevitable" changes in the international system. Britain found itself in such a terrible predicament during the Second World War because its interwar leaders failed to manage their country's relative decline, not because its leaders in 1914 wouldn't place their country's security and prosperity at the sufferance of Germany. Of course, Britain's independence has been greatly diminished since the Second World War; but thanks to British statesmen on the eve of the First World War, London has been under the sway of a (relatively) benign hegemon across the Atlantic Ocean rather than an unpredictable and strident one across the English Channel. Finally, although Professor Cantor is a fine medieval historian, his suggestion that Britain's leaders conspiratorially committed their country to war to "cover up" internal weaknesses is unsupported by any historical evidence.

If Stephen Adler's assessment of the peculiar incompetence of British generals were correct, how do we explain the fact that Britain suffered far fewer casualties than Germany, France, Russia, and Austro-Hungary? From 1914 to 1918 the British army learned at hideous cost a new kind of warfare that baffled even experienced Continental armies. Incompetent generals there certainly were, as there are in every war. But the terrible truth -- the tragedy -- of the Great War was that the wealth that was available to the great powers for war-making, together with the state of military technology, meant that no masterstroke of strategy would swiftly or at low cost terminate the struggle.

In the May issue of The Atlantic, William Aron, William Burke, and Milton Freeman argue that whales can be killed under hunting restrictions for years to come ("Flouting the Convention"). Yes, they can, but should they be killed at all? On purely sentimental grounds I stand with the whales in the debate. I draw support from the voice of the Irish storyteller Sean O'Faolain, who reminds us that "we are for a great part of our lives at the mercy of uncharted currents of the heart."

Whales are awesome. A sperm whale dives a mile deep in the sea and holds its breath for more than an hour. The blue whale (the largest mammal) outweighs the pygmy shrew (the smallest) by a factor of ninety million, yet the two have similar tissues and organs, and both, I presume, nurse their young with a certain tenderness. Whales live in families and play in the moonlight; they talk to one another in distress. They are more complete and successful in their world than we are in ours. They deserve to be known and cherished, not for their potential as meatballs but as a collective inspiration for humankind. The thought of managing them for their spiritual value alone seems far more civilized than is the thought of managing them to satisfy a tiny fraction of the world's insatiable demand for marine products of commerce.

Victor B. Scheffer

We cannot accept the view that caring about human beings is antagonistic to being concerned for plants and animals. It is our responsibility to see that our ecosystem is preserved. Implicit in this is a recognition of the importance of all life forms, including those used for food as well as those enjoyed for their beauty or their role in preserving biological balance. A healthy and inspiring world, however, requires more than biological diversity; it is also strongly dependent on cultural diversity.

We plead for understanding of those cultures different from our own. We share with Victor Scheffer his awe for whales. They are magnificent. He clearly states that his views are sentimental; he is a distinguished marine scientist, but his cultural perspective on whales, too, merits respect. Such sentiments, in our view, do not outweigh the needs of other cultures and communities whose ongoing dependence on whaling can be demonstrated. As long as they conduct their food-getting activities in a nonwasteful, ecologically sound, and lawful manner, we cannot believe there is any legitimate basis for thinking that the world is too small to accommodate such cultural differences.

The fact that people may choose to eat a particular animal does not imply disrespect or even indifference. In fact, many hunters speak of a special closeness to the animals they hunt -- something that many nonhunters find hard to understand.

As someone who makes a living growing and selling apples, I read with some concern your June Almanac item on food [regarding the level of pesticide residues in certain fruits]. A typical consumer might conclude that eating U.S. produce poses a serious health risk. Far from it. Using a broad brush to paint a negative picture, and inflammatory statements such as "potentially unhealthy to children" and "domestic produce in general is more contaminated than imported," the author uses tabloid tactics to alarm, rather than inform, the public.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university’s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other ‘issues.’ ”)

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.